Quota is account-level ambient status, like battery — not a feature anyone opens. Desktop solved it with a footer status strip in the sidebar chrome. Mobile has no persistent chrome, so each direction below borrows the weight of something already ambient on Home: the machine-status line, the bottom edge of the window, or the machine block itself. The rejected toolbar pill is not repeated — nothing here sits among icon buttons.
Ambient means borrowed weight. No card, no fill, no radius, no icon. Every direction is mono numbers and a 2pt bar attached to a hairline that already exists in the layout.
Remaining, not consumed. The bar depletes left-to-right and the number reads 58% left. A battery empties; so does this. The detail sheet keeps the same direction.
Escalation is ink only. At ≥80% used the tightest window turns amber #E0A93B. Same geometry, same position, no pulse, no banner, no reflow.
Absence is first-class. API-key accounts and pre-snapshot states drop the element entirely. Each no-data frame below is the untouched Home layout — no hole, no placeholder.
Why it reads as chrome: it joins a sentence the user already skims past — Mac Studio · online · 1 session — at the same 12.5–14px secondary weight, so it is one more fact about the connection rather than a control placed near one. Lightest footprint of the three, and the only one that costs zero vertical space.
Grey bar, grey percent, no separator of its own. At arm's length it is texture on the status line; read deliberately it says 7d is the tighter window.
Bar and number go amber; the label and the word left stay grey so the colour marks the value, not the whole row. Nothing moves.
Segment gone, machine line unchanged, ellipsis truncation still available to a long machine name. This is the current Home exactly.
One window only. The 5h window — the one that actually interrupts a working session — is invisible until it becomes the tightest. Also competes for line width with the review affordance that already lives at the right end of this row.
Home only. Sessions and Chat have no machine line, so quota disappears one screen in — acceptable if Home is the hub, weak if people live in Chat.
44pt tap target via negative margin; the visible element stays 26pt tall.
Why it reads as chrome: it is outside the scroll container. The project list runs under a hairline and stops; the strip does not move, does not scroll, and belongs to no section — the same argument that made it work in the desktop sidebar footer, and the same position the phone already uses for system furniture. Both windows fit, with the tightest reset time trailing.
48pt strip, hairline top, page background — no fill, so it reads as an edge rather than a bar. 5h and 7d in one glance.
Only the breaching window changes ink. 5h stays grey at 44% left, so the comparison between the two windows survives the alarm.
Strip and its hairline both go; the list simply runs to the bottom edge. The list is the only thing that gains height, so nothing else reflows.
The only direction that travels. Identical strip on the session list, well away from the archive/help/settings row at the top — quota never joins the icon cluster that was rejected before.
Cost. 48pt of permanent height on two screens, and it must yield to anything that docks later (a composer, a tab bar). If a bottom bar ever ships, the strip merges into its top hairline rather than stacking.
Reach. Home and Sessions. Chat keeps CtxPill in the connection bar and does not take the strip — two persistent meters on one screen would compete.
Why recommended. Closest structural match to the desktop footer, carries both windows without abbreviating, and is the only option whose meaning does not depend on a neighbouring sentence.
Why it reads as chrome: the machine line grows into a full-bleed band bounded by hairlines top and bottom, matching the Open any folder… band directly below it. Bands in this layout are standing facts about the connection; list rows are things you tap to go somewhere. Quota lands in the first grammar, indented under the machine dot so it is visibly subordinate to identity rather than a peer of the projects.
Both windows, plus the account they belong to — the only direction that answers "whose quota?" without opening the sheet.
Amber sits beside a green machine dot without contradiction: the machine is fine, the account is not. The band does not change height or gain a border.
Band collapses back to the plain status line rather than standing empty — identical to A's and B's no-data frame, which is the proof that all three degrade to today's Home.
Adds ~34pt above the fold and puts two hairline bands back to back near the top of Home, which is the heaviest header this screen has carried. Watch it against the reconnecting/offline banner, which lands in the same zone.
Home only, same as A. The band cannot follow into Sessions without inventing a machine header there.
Quota is per account, not per machine. Grouping it under the machine reads correctly with one computer and misleads with several — the account line is doing real work here.
Same three parts in the same order as the entry point — label, 2pt bar, mono remainder — with the reset countdown added and the per-model window that the strip cannot show. The tap is an expansion, not a navigation: the user recognises the row they touched at the top of the sheet.
Shared tokens. Track rgba(255,255,255,.14) at 2pt; normal fill #8C8D95; warning #E0A93B; numbers JetBrains Mono 12.5px in the chrome, 13.5px in the sheet; labels always 5h / 7d.
Footer unchanged. updated 2 min ago plus manual Refresh in terracotta. The entry point never shows staleness — if the snapshot is old, the strip holds its last value and the sheet explains.